Matt Mazur

From The Quick and Easy Way to Effective Speaking by Dale Carnegie:

When Julius Caesar sailed over the channel from Gaul and landed with his legions in what is now England, what did he do to insure the success of his army?  A very clever thing: he halted his soldiers on the chalk cliffs of Dover; and, looking down over the waves two hundred feet below, they saw red tongues of fire consume every ship in which they had crossed.  In the enemy’s country, with the last link with the Continent gone, the last means of retreat burned, there was but one thing left for them to do: to advance, to conquer. That is precisely what they did.

-You understand the numbers are against you and realize even if you fail it’s worth trying again; you believe it’s better to go for 0 for 50 than 0 for 0.

-You provide a utility that is good enough for someone to pay for.

-Your startup saves someone time or make someone’s life easier.

-Your costs are so low you’re virtually impossible to kill.

-You don’t care about material possessions.

-Your startup makes others money.

-You treasure not (or rarely) having meetings.

-You love working for yourself.

-There’s very little wasted time and red tape. Your team is lean, mean and aggressive.

-You’re patient. Twitter, Kayak, Plenty of Fish and Facebook have been around longer than you think. And two of them aren’t even profitable.

-You know IPOs or acquisitions aren’t required to make a good living..

-You do instead of talking about doing.

-You realize, in the very early stages, that the worst thing that could happen is you lose a few hundred or thousand dollars and learn something. What do you have to lose?

-When you get lucky or catch a break you’re ready for it.

-You believe that success is the amount of your life you control.

-You love what you do. Or at the very least, love your situation.

-You avoid blanket statements like this: All the millionaires were in porn in 2000 and realize that not every “startup rule” or any rule applies. Businesses can be very different from each other.

-You understand that your odds of having an enjoyable job paying 200k are roughly the same as owning a profitable small business.

Posted here by Dan Haubert, cofounder of TicketStumbler.

Meaningful work is one of the most important things we can impart to children. Meaningful work is work that is autonomous. Work that is complex, that occupies your mind. And work where there is a relationship between effort and reward — for everything you put in, you get something out…

If you are convinced that the work you are doing is meaningful, then curiosity, there’s no cost to it. If you think there’s always got to be a connection between what you put in and what you get out, then of course you’ll run off with a great excitement after an idea that catches your idea.

Malcom Gladwell, via 37Signals

I make it a point not to quote Paul Graham too often, simply because there’s a lot of good quotes and it seems a bit artificial when done too often. That being said, I found today’s article on credentials to be particularly insightful:

Large organizations can’t [accurately measure performance]. But a bunch of small organizations in a market can come close. A market takes every organization and keeps just the good ones. As organizations get smaller, this approaches taking every person and keeping just the good ones. So all other things being equal, a society consisting of more, smaller organizations will care less about credentials.
…
In a world of small companies, performance is all anyone cares about. People hiring for a startup don’t care whether you’ve even graduated from college, let alone which one. All they care about is what you can do.

For those unfamiliar with his work, check out his online essays, which are extremely good. Or, if you prefer book format, try Hackers & Painters.

For many reasons I hope that my career path (for lack of a better word) leads me to a startup one day.

Time will tell.

Here’s a great video via HackerNews by Clay Shirky, a well known social technology guru, on the importance of passionate internet communities.

Some good quotes:

“They didn’t care that they’d seen it work in practice because they already knew it couldn’t work in theory.”

“The solidity was on the side of the thing that looked evanescent.”

“What has happened, what is happening in our generation is that we have a set of tools for aggregating things that people care about in ways that increase the scope and longevity in ways that were unpredictable even a decade ago.”

“You will make more accurate predictions about software and in this web driving world about services if you ask yourself not whats the business model but rather do the people who like it take care of each other. That turns out to be the better predictor of longevity.”

“…Asking for nothing but the chance to come together and do something interesting”

Somewhat coincidentally, while exploring prior submissions of other HackerNews users I came across Bruce Schneier’s review of Shirky’s recent book Here Comes Everybody:

[Shirky's] new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, explores a world where organizational costs are close to zero and where ad hoc, loosely connected groups of unpaid amateurs can create an encyclopedia larger than the Britannica and a computer operating system to challenge Microsoft’s.

I’m going to use this as an excuse to go pick up the book.

Rather than studying business, what about starting a company from scratch? If history is any guide, a significant number of people who are laid off over the coming year will do just that. Carl Schramm, the head of the Kauffman Foundation, a non-profit organisation that promotes entrepreneurial activity, points out that start-ups tend to flourish in the year that follows a sharp downturn. Rather than head back to another corporate bureaucracy, some of those made redundant will take a shot at being their own boss.

from The Economist

Quick little lesson on using the URI parse method, using an example:

uri = URI.parse("http://www.mattmazur.com/2008/11/macs-productivity-made-easy/")

uri.host = "www.mattmazur.com"
uri.scheme = "http"
uri.port = 80
uri.path = "/2008/11/macs-productivity-made-easy/"

More details on URI including other methods here.

I posted a question on HN yesterday asking for clarification on an array of legal issues. They included questions about when to form a company, what type of lawyers to seek, and how to deal with copyright issues. The responses were generally well thought out but varied a lot.

- Form an LLC immediately (it only costs a few hundred dollars) to get some liability coverage. Most recommended talking to a lawyer before you launch, but forming an LLC is better than nothing.

- Definitely seek a lawyer when you start having employees because you’ll have to restructure the company, often to a C corp (need to research)

- For charging money you’ll have Terms and Conditions, which should be created/reviewed by a lawyer

- You produce content it is copyrighted. The little © doesn’t really mean much

- People can take your idea and modify it all they want. There’s not much you can do to stop them

- If you have a partner, make sure you have an Operating Agreement

- The type of lawyer that you look for to help with these things is a Corporate Lawyer

- Forming an LLC is easy; keeping up on the paperwork is hard. Make sure you do it properly

Matt Maroon, a poker player gone entrepreneur via YC threw in his 2c: don’t ask hackers, ask a lawyer. He followed up with an excellent blog post expanding on the idea:

This is dangerous to you, seeker of legal advice, because you’ll be fooled into thinking maybe, just maybe, you can save yourself the retainer. The guy telling you “oh don’t bother to form an LLC, you’re not making a profit yet so you can’t be sued” sounds so confident, surely he must know what he’s talking about. He doesn’t, and you really don’t want to find that out the hard way.

He goes on to explain how the law is difficult to understand and you assume a huge amount of risk by not taking the proper legal precautions. While I agree with him, I think that asking the community has merits too. For me, the question was somewhat of a starting point. None of the posts are a definitive “you should do this” and they couldn’t be, but it still gives me a foundation for future research. The ensuing discussion was filled with smart comments on his article. Some of the best points made included:

- It can be tough to know when it is appropriate to consult a lawyer

- It can cost a lot of $ to consult a lawyer. The benefits might not outweigh the costs. -$EV

- What if the lawyer wants to screw you over and take your money? People responded that most don’t do this because of reputation and they want you to come back in the future, spread the word, etc

- Keep in mind its free advice from nonprofessionals

Check out this great speech by Chris Wanstrath, a notable Rails developer. Most of the stuff I really liked was towards the end:

I don’t know how many of you read RSS, but I challenge you (that’s a keynote term) to give it up for a month. Just turn it off. Stop using Google Reader or NetNewsWire or whatever
the kids are using these days. It’s not worth your time.

If you’ve been meaning to learn a new language, start learning it. But don’t just read a book. Start writing a program.

In fact, stop worrying so much about other people. Every time I’ve worked on a project I thought other people would really love, it was a massive flop. Every time I’ve worked on a project I loved, it worked. If you’re sitting in this room, your taste is not as far off from those around you as you’d think. Build something you love and others will love it, too. (Not everyone, of course.)

My plea to you today is to start a side project. Scratch your own itch. Be creative. Share something with the world, or keep it to yourself.

One thing he mentions is to take one Sunday a month and just go go go. I think this is a really great idea for me given my current time crunch.

This article on pricing strategies was near the top of Hacker News today. It’s a really excellent read for anyone consider how to price a product. Here’s a quote:

The Nine and Zero Effect. People associate the number nine with value and zero with quality. Look at the difference between fast food and a gourmet restaurant. A burger meal can sell for about $4.99 while a gourmet entree at the best place in town may go for $30. So the psychology of pricing isn’t so much about gaining additional sales because the price appears to be lower, it’s about what the price communicates about your offering. So which do you want to communicate? Value or Quality? Now you can price accordingly.

Check it out.

A few months ago I wrote some poker software that I intended to sell online (more on that in another post). I changed the price seven or eight times before I released the final product. The price went from $25 to $29 to $35 to $40 to $39 to $34 to $10 to $0.

That curve pretty much reflects my optimism about the project too…